By virtue of Baptism, each baptized person becomes a disciple of Jesus Christ. This title is both a grace to be treasured and a responsibility to be fully assumed. These find their culmination in the virtue of love without which nothing in the Church can take place. One concrete sign of this love is the awareness and capacity to respond to the great commission of Jesus well expressed in Matthew 28:20 and Mark 16:15 to share the Good News to all Nations and to the whole creation. Mission is thus, not a service to monopolize, but a task to be taken up by each disciple. Pope Francis reminds us that all the baptized, whatever their position in the Church or their level of instruction in the faith, are agents of evangelization, and it would be insufficient to envisage a plan of evangelization to be carried out by professionals while the rest of the faithful would simply be passive recipients.[1]
However, for this enterprise to be successful, one has to carefully identify what are the needs of today’s people and the challenges of our World, the methods and models to imitate, and the fields in which the Gospel seeds can find a fertile soil. Thus, this short reflection does not pretend to bring out magical solutions to today’s challenges with regard to evangelization. Rather, it proposes itself as glimpse and an attempt to give insights to how to speak of God today.
- The challenges of our time
As of faith, today’s World is facing a complex crisis which can summarily be looked into through 4 points:
- Secularism which in its extreme point of view has led a great number of people to the conviction that they neither need God nor any supreme being in their lives;
- Individualism which convinces some that they are self-sufficient to the point that they should solely rely on individual success and that their lives is a possession for which they can take any decision at any time;
- The illusion of modernism that has pushed many people to think that advanced technology could provide means to solve all the problems of human being;
- And the misunderstanding of human dominion which convinces some that they could exploit the rest of creation resulting to environmental crisis.
All the above aspects eventually were thought to be the source of happiness for men and women of our times, but ended up by deluding them. If many found in them exterior satisfaction, still their interiority remained empty. For this, there is an intense need within people to reconnect with the self and nourish an intense interior life.
- Mission today as an occasion of encountering and sharing experience
With regards to today’s challenges, the urgent need of evangelization does not consist in announcing a new revelation or a message different from what our forefathers have preached. It is to share the same salvific message of Jesus but with new methods and ways that respond to the needs of our times. The job of the missionary today aims at rekindling in people the thirst of God by helping them reconnect with the spiritual. But, how to do so?
One way which might not be the best, but not the least, is the capacity to share one’s God experience with others, how one has encountered the Lord and has experienced his love till deciding to believe. Indeed, Benedict XVI states that being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.[2]
For this, doing mission today comprises being intrepid enough to go out from one’s comfort zone in order to encounter the other. The latter might be a disoriented youth who wants to find meaning to his life, a lonely person who has lost the joy of life, an abandoned child on the street, a suffering person who considers life to be senseless, a migrant or a refugee who experiences hopelessness, a single parent who has hard time to care for the offspring, etc.
The missionary of today ought to create bonds of meetings, sharing, discussions with all people regardless of their social positions, race, jobs, etc. He is to encounter the people in the concrete situation where they live, and be familiar to them or better to say, he must experience a certain incarnation which makes of him one of the people. He should strive to know what is their center of focus or interest, and identify signs or even seeds of the Gospel in their lives. For instance, to preach to the youth today would mean to identify where they spend most of their time. It means meeting them on social medias where they spend at least more than two hours every day, sharing spiritual insights with them through short videos, podcast, meeting them in the place of their job, in the place of their entertainment, making friendship with them, etc. Furthermore, mission today means to be able to use the language that best talks to each group of people. In doing so, the missionary becomes an instrument used by God to let many reconnect with their inner being, rediscover meaning to their lives, to progressively have their own God experience and nurture a useful relationship with the Lord.
- Mission today: an opportunity to live out a faith that does justice and liberates
Today, evangelizing is not merely a share of ideas or convictions. It includes a pragmatic dimension. What we teach or share must be expressed through concrete actions. These actions are the care for those on margins, the destitute, those abandoned or rejected, the lonely, etc. It involves the willingness to defend the defenseless and to do justice to the wronged in appliance of the exhortation of Amos who urges to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Am 5:24).”
Indeed, to talk about Jesus today, implies a pragmatic dimension. Gustavo Gutiérrez reminds that to talk about God “requires that we discover the features of Christ in the sometimes-disfigured faces of the poor of this World. This discovery will not be made apart from concrete gestures of solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are wretched, abandoned, and deprived.”[3] Thus, evangelization calls to make justice the religion of the world where people live in covenant of mutual support, breaking the chains of slavery rather than a mutual exploitation.
To sum, let me say that mission today stands as an emergent need. It necessitates the capacity of encounter. For this, the missionary is called to become a living bridge through which God meets his whole creation to recreate it and give it new life. Thus, he is to become a living Gospel for his contemporaries for them to experience the healing, merciful, loving, and compassionate presence of God in their midst. This endeavor is not a monopoly of some people, but rather a duty and service of all the disciples of Jesus each according to his capacities and the opportunities in his environment.
[1] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, n*120.
[2] Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, n*1
[3] Gutiérrez Gustavo, On Job. God-talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, Maryknoll, New York, 1995, P. 17
